Barn Owl Diary (with photos) – 2nd February 2008
Regular followers of my ‘Kingfisher Diary (with photos)’ thread –
Kingfisher Diary (with photos) – may recall that in one of my updates to that thread last November I mentioned the possibility of trying to do a similar thing with a pair of locally nesting Barn Owls this year.
For those who didn’t see/don’t remember that update and to give you a bit of background, here’s what I said at the time –
“Another bit of good news (for me at least) is that as a result of growing local interest in my Kingfisher monitoring/photographs, a few months ago one of our local farmers and his wife invited me to observe and photograph a family of Barn Owls on their land. Here again, due to the personal/family issues which have dominated my life over recent months (and the fact that I didn’t have the necessary Schedule 1 licence for these birds), I wasn’t able to take up this opportunity until the chicks had fledged and had become almost totally independent of the parent birds. However, once the young birds had been flying for almost 4 weeks and had begun hunting for themselves I did spend several evenings at the site and managed to get some half-decent shots, some of which I’ll post in the
Gallery shortly. However, my Schedule 1 licence application for next year is in the post so maybe a ‘Barn Owl Diary (with photos)’ will be my next project?”
Well, I’m absolutely delighted
to be able to report that my Schedule 1 Licence for Barn Owls has recently come through – my thanks once again to the Licensing staff at Natural England for their help – and I’m now the grateful owner of a dual licence authorising me to photograph both our local nesting Kingfishers and the Barn Owls which, hopefully, will both nest again this year just a few hundred metres from my house.
Now I realise that I may be tempting fate
by starting this diary thread so early and before the birds have even paired up in the nest site area for this year’s breeding season, but I thought it might be useful to ‘set the scene’ as it were and to give you all some of the background information before the action starts in a few weeks time.
Incidentally, although many Barn Owls mate for life they don’t always roost together throughout the year, but by early March established breeding pairs will usually be roosting together at or near their chosen nest site for the coming breeding season. After a few weeks of courtship behaviour with lots of chasing around, screeching at each other and with the male presenting food to the female (to build up her energy and strength for task ahead), actual egg-laying typically begins in April or May.
So about the nest site area itself – it’s about a ¼ mile from my home on a fairly typical County Council owned small arable farm here in rural Cambridgeshire which, sadly and like our local Kingfisher nest site, is now under serious and fairly imminent threat of large-scale development. Early last year the farmer (who I’ve known for more than 20 years and whose sons were good childhood friends of my own son) erected 3 Barn Owl nestboxes around the farm. He built them himself to a design recommended by the Barn Owl Conservation Network (BOCN) –
BOCN- The Website of the Barn Owl Conservation Network (a project of the Hawk and Owl Trust –
Home) - and one of the BOCN’s local volunteers advised on the selection of suitable sites for the boxes.
By March a pair had taken up residence in one of the boxes and they went on to raise a family of 4 youngsters, all of which successfully fledged last July
having been ringed in the nest by the BOCN’s BTO licensed ringer.
Here are 3 photographs showing the nestboxes - the 1st is the one used last year and you’ll see it’s on a field edge but with quite a large area of rough grassland by the side. The 2nd is similarly located with a good area of rough grassland beside it and the 3rd has been placed right on the edge of a small area of woodland, overlooking a cropped field but with lots of rough grassland and field ditches/tracks very near.
Since last year’s young fledged little has been seen of the adult birds near to the nest site, but this is not really surprising as although adult Barn Owls are highly sedentary birds their hunting range during winter may be up to about 2 miles whereas it’s often as little as a ½ mile during the breeding season.
I had a walk around the area a couple of weeks ago and identified several suitable positions for on-site hides to be placed. The plan is to wait for the birds to return and for them select a nestbox (probably the same one as last year) and then to allow them sufficient time to settle in before erecting a hide near to their chosen box. This on-site hide will be of a similar design to that used at our local Kingfisher nest site (where it worked a treat) and will be erected over a period of several days so as to allow the birds to gradually get used to its presence. I shall also again be using my portable dome hide (from Kevin Keatley at Wildlife Watching Supplies) as when necessary.
For those who are interested in the technical stuff and before anyone asks, all my photographs will be taken with my Canon EOS30D and my Canon EF
100 – 400 f4.5-5.6L IS USM lens which I certainly don’t claim to be the ‘best’ camera/lens combination but it’s the one I’ve got and it has served me very well with our local Kingfishers. However, as most of my observations and photography of the Owls will be during the early evening when light conditions will not be at their best, I may well expand my lens stock by adding an EF 70 – 200 f2.8L IS USM.
Hopefully, it will be rather easier to get good flight shots of the much larger and slower-flying Owls as they approach/leave the nest area than has so far proved to be the case with the Kingfishers
I had contemplated the use of flash with an extender and although flash photography of Owls didn’t appear to raise any concerns during the days of Eric Hosking (one of my bird photographer heroes and renowned for his work with Owls), the current thinking on the subject seems to be that flash should not be used for wild nocturnal birds such as Owls and Nightjars. This is not for fear of causing the birds any permanent eyesight problems but flash does apparently disrupt their ‘dark adaptation’ and can seriously impair their hunting ability for up to an hour – during the short nights of summer and with young mouths to feed, such disruption could be disastrous and, as ever, the welfare of the birds must come first and so I have completely discounted the idea.
Turning to the format of this Diary, as my Kingfisher Diary thread proved so popular (being one of WAB’s most viewed British Birds forum threads ever, with more than 7,000 views and 180 replies – thank you all for your interest and encouragement
), I had in mind to follow the same pattern here with regular updates on the progress of the birds accompanied with photographs. However, constructive criticism is always welcome
and as I’m not easily offended please feel free to put forward your suggestions, ideas and comments as to how the Diary might be improved and I’ll do my best to take them on board.
Finally and just to get some photos of the subject matter into the thread, here’s a couple of my favourite shots from last summer – I do hope I can get many more reasonable quality shots to share with you during the coming months, particularly of the birds during their courtship behaviour and breeding activities and flying in with prey, etc, so please do keep your fingers crossed that they actually turn up or this could be one of the shortest diary threads ever
Jeff